After 90 days of testing 8 NAS units in our home media lab, our team found the best NAS for Plex media server setups in depends on three things: your transcoding needs, storage ambition, and tolerance for tinkering. We pushed each device through 4K HDR streams, multi-user load tests, and container setups to find the … Read more
Looking for the best NAS for Jellyfin home servers in ? You have come to the right place. After spending three months stress-testing eight NAS enclosures on our home lab bench – running Jellyfin in Docker, hammering each unit with simultaneous 4K HEVC transcodes, and measuring power draw at idle – we have a clear … Read more
If you have spent any time streaming 4K files through Plex, you already know how painful buffering can be. I built my first media server with whatever spare parts I had lying around, and the experience was rough — stuttering, dropped frames, and a hard drive that sounded like a jet engine. After testing dozens … Read more
For most small businesses, the Synology DS1525+ is the best NAS you can buy in because it pairs 5 drive bays, 10GbE-ready networking, and a software ecosystem that has been battle-tested by thousands of IT admins for nearly two decades. We spent 60 days putting eight contenders through real office workloads – file shares, video … Read more
Looking for a low-power home server that won’t drive up your electricity bill? I spent the last three months testing ten pre-built options ranging from Raspberry Pi kits to compact mini PCs and dedicated NAS devices, and I want to share what actually works for 24/7 home server use. A low-power home server is a … Read more
I ran my home setup on Google Drive and Dropbox subscriptions for years, then realized I was paying roughly $120 a year for a service that throttled my speeds and kept changing the rules. That is when I bought my first budget NAS. Eight months later, every photo, every movie rip, and every server backup … Read more
Setting up your first home server used to require a tower PC, a Linux install, and a lot of patience. Today, the best 2-bay NAS devices for beginners ship with a polished desktop interface, one-click mobile backups, and a setup wizard that walks you through RAID in plain English. After 30 days of testing 8 … Read more
Finding the best 4-bay NAS devices for the money in is harder than it looks. I spent six weeks testing eight different network attached storage units, loading them with drives, running RAID rebuilds, and streaming 4K video to see which ones actually deliver on their promises. Four bays hit the sweet spot for most home … Read more
If you’ve ever waited 20 minutes for a 50GB video file to copy from your computer to your network attached storage, you already understand why the best NAS devices with 10GbE networking exist. Standard gigabit ethernet tops out around 125 MB/s, but a true 10 gigabit ethernet NAS pushes that to over 1,000 MB/s. That’s … Read more
I built my first home lab with two cheap consumer drives I pulled from old gaming PCs. Within 18 months, one of them failed and took a chunk of my Plex library with it. That painful lesson sent me down the rabbit hole of enterprise hard drives for home labs, and the difference in reliability … Read more